Firewall Management “Best Practices.”

Best practices are guidelines or “suggestions” that are put in place to acquire the best firewall security on an affordable plan. Best practices for firewall management should always be well written; otherwise the plan will most certainly fail. One would need to completely understand the organization’s technology and infrastructure to decide where a firewall is necessary.

Once a decision is made and the firewall is in place, a risk assessment must be performed. This involves awareness of all vulnerabilities and any likelihood of threats facing the framework. The policy must be regularly reviewed to ensure that it works efficiently and also that reliability, quality, and security are evaluated and improved upon. Establishing a no-exceptions policy, maintaining physical security and control over employees and other personnel access to the existing firewall, limiting and filtering internet connectivity, installing antivirus scanners, anti-malware scanners and firewalls on every host, limiting or avoiding remote access, insisting on encryption requirements, hardening both internal firewall hosts and border firewalls, backing up systems to guard against data loss, erecting an instruction and incident response plan, and prioritizing, and developing a firewall checklist are other ways to enlist a best practices policy for firewall management.

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